LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.

Cast off. Don't look back.

“Soon,” she says, and the piano music falters and stops. “We’ll go hungry, and then the end will come, for me but not for you.”

“We broke into the galley today and found appalling things: corpse-candles, graven images, and the mortal remains of Able Seaman Ayrton, rendered partially to stock. The wretched cook would only cackle: You liked him better salted…”

Auroral Megalops roam the waters – large enough to consume a pony with messy and clattering glee, or to pose a menace to ill-prepared ships.

“We sighted Mt Nomad again today, still afloat but listing, her dark glass flanks scored and pitted from the cannon-fire in our previous encounter. This will be the last battle. This monster has harrowed the seas too long.”

Take to the dark waters

Welcome to the dark and hilarious Victorian-Gothic underworld of Fallen London, where every choice has a consequence, from the style of your hat to the price of your soul. Except this time around, the Unterzee is your oyster.

Choose your ship, name your captain, and leave the bustle of the docks for the wild and lightless depths of the Unterzee. The map changes every time you play, and every officer in your crew has their own story.

Encounter a corsairs’ village in a forest of stalagmites, come face to face with the vicious war trimarans of the New Khanate or the golden agents of the Dawn Machine. Grow strong and wise and rich and feared. With luck and skill you may achieve your ambitions: find your father’s bones, found a pirate princedom or sail beyond the Unterzee into the strangeness at time’s heart.

Build a fine crew

Find and recruit officers on your travels. These perhaps unsavoury folks are treasure troves of stories.

Get to know your First Officer and she might share the co-ordinates of a secret smugglers’ cove stuffed with drowning-pearls. Feed your ship’s cat a moonish sprat and it may begin to glow in the dark. Invite your surgeon to dinner in your cabin and… well, who knows?

Ships, monsters & the terrible darkness

The Unterzee is a realm of sombre beauty. It is always night – where that light off your starboard bow might be a friendly port or the glowing teeth of a zee-beast. Turn up your lights to see farthest, let them sink low to escape detection… or to become the hunter.

Like everything else in Sunless Sea, light has its cost, and not just in the fuel it takes to power your glim-lamps. If you can see your enemy, they can see you, and you’ll risk leaving yourself adrift at the mercy of the tideless black.

Improve and customise your ship as you increase your prowess on the black waters. Begin with a Splinter-Salvo and Evasive Manoeuvres: aspire to the Rarefaction Cannon and the terrifying Unclear Bomb…

Gameplay

It’ll take dozens of games to explore all the sub-plots, grand arcs, alternatives, mysteries, relationships and romances in the game. Your character will die (or disappear, or lose her mind, or be hollowed out and filled with candle-wax and haunt a cliff-top chapel), but their legacy may survive. You’ll build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the Unterzee and lost – or won…

Enter Sunless Sea

Latest news

Hello! This is the final post in our series on Sunless Sea’s sales and funding. So far, we’ve covered Kickstarter in part I and pre-orders and Greenlight in part II. This time, we’ll be talking about our aggregate sales figures – in early access, and in the month since final release. Before we began development in […]

In this post, we’ll be talking about our Greenlight campaign and pre-orders. In part I, we covered our Kickstarter. Pre-Orders Once our Kickstarter ended, we started taking pre-orders. We never made pre-orders available on any store – we just sold them on our website through a Humble Widget, at a 15% discount on the full retail price. Here’s a […]

Hello! Adam here. It’s been over a month now since Sunless Sea left early access. It was our first downloadable game. We weren’t entirely sure what to expect. Back in early 2013, when we first considered making it, very few kickstarted games had been released. Greenlight was less than a year old. And there wasn’t […]